Emergentism revisited

Abstract

The “explanatory gap” is proposed to be the “hard problem” of
consciousness research and has generated a great deal of recent
debate.
Arguments brought forward to reveal this gap include the
conceivability of zombies or the “super-neuroscientist” Mary. These
are supposed to show that the facts of consciousness are not a priori
entailed by the microphysical facts.
Similar arguments were already proposed by emergence theories in
the context of the debate between mechanism and vitalism.
According to synchronic emergentism, the property of a system is
emergent, when it cannot - in principle - be deduced from a complete
description of the system’s components.
Here, I argue that apart from phenomenal properties there are many
other properties that, even though they are clearly physical, are not
reductively explainable either. The explanatory gap of consciousness
is therefore only a part of a much more general problem.

References in Article

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